Transportation Camp West #transpo

I’ll be at Transportation Camp West in San Francisco this weekend.

People come together at this ‘unconference’ to discuss ideas on using electronic technology to improve transportation. We’ll talk about how to apply technologies such as Web 2.0, mobile computing, open data and APIs to quickly improve mobility at low cost. Transportation Camp brings innovators from disparate fields in in public administration, transportation operations, information design, and software engineering together.

Google Maps API is an example of this, with a plethora of online applications and mashups utilizing Google’s mapping and information services to create bicycle crash visualizations, crowd-sourced bike route finders, online training tools, and a social network to encourage charity while riding or running.

In the realm of bicycling, Internet bicycle route finders and GPS tools have already lowered some of the hurdles encountered by newbies, whose first question after “What bike to I get?” is “How do I get there from here?” Online transit planners have done the same for people who are often befuddled and intimidated by paper transit schedules.

For a preview of what to expect, see this Streetfilm Transportation Camp East from New York two weeks ago.



No tickets are available for this weekend’s camp, though you can add yourself to a waiting list.

I’ll know a handful of people at this conference (Jym, Tom, and Steve), and I look forward to meeting others. I’m looking at the list of attendees and I realize it’s a great opportunity for me to learn just how much I don’t know about transportation planning 🙂

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